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Sculpted Wi-Fi waves can turn your whole office into a computer

By Leah Crane

WI-FI can do more than just get your computer online: it can be a computer in and of itself. Bouncing Wi-Fi waves around a room in a precise and controlled manner allows them to be used as an “analogue computer” to do complex calculations.

Philipp del Hougne at the Langevin Institute in France and Geoffroy Lerosey at tech start-up Greenerwave dreamed up the idea. They created a way to use microwaves like the ones that carry Wi-Fi to perform calculations as they scatter through the air. “You can do the whole operation in one go, whereas …